In this episode of It’s Just Research, hosts Dr Sara Black and Liam Cini O’Dwyer are joined by Dr Carla Finesilver to explore how students learn mathematics, and how the way we represent maths shapes that learning. While children often encounter maths through everyday experiences like sharing and problem-solving, classroom maths can quickly become formal and procedural. Carla discusses how this shift towards symbols and standardised methods can limit creativity and disengage many learners.

You can read more about Carla’s research in her recent paper: Beyond categories: Dynamic qualitative analysis of visuospatial representation in arithmetic

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Dr Sara Black speaks with Professor Chris Winch about informal education and the ways we learn outside formal schooling.

Drawing on his recent book Civil Society’s Education, Chris explains how children develop language, behaviour, values, and practical skills through participation in family and community life, learning through experience, imitation, and shared activity rather than formal teaching.

The conversation also explores how social practices such as promise-keeping, loyalty, and shared norms are sustained through participation and mutual recognition, and reflects on the tension between social conditioning and human freedom.

Civil Society’s Education Reflections on the Informal Roots of Learning was published in 2025 by Bloomsbury.

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In the first episode of Season Three, hosts Dr Sara Black and Liam Cini O’Dwyer speak with Dr Billy Holzberg about his award-winning book Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and the Emotional Politics of Migration Control.

Drawing on his research in Gender Studies, Billy explores how emotions are not simply private feelings but powerful forces that shape political life. Introducing the concept of affective bordering, he shows how empathy, fear, anger and hope work together to construct boundaries between those seen as deserving of care and those positioned as threats.

Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and the Emotional Politics of Migration Control received the 2025 British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

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